Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language. This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.

Is Will’s language over the top? Hardly, as you can see from this excerpt. The government is trying to steal the hotel because a tiny percentage of guests engaged in victimless crimes.

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug-dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate — the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate — these 30 episodes involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days. Yet this is the government’s excuse for impoverishing the Caswells by seizing this property, which is their only significant source of income and all of their retirement security. The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence — to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible remains vague.

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail. She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. “The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.” So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son. Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

You probably can figure out the rest of the story. Radley’s column has a lot of additional details, but here are a couple of passages to whet your appetite.

The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It’s a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair. It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. “The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money,” Williams says. “Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money.” …Civil asset forfeiture is based on the premise that a piece of property — a car, a pile of cash, a house — can be guilty of a crime. Laws vary from state to state, but generally, law enforcement officials can seize property if they can show any connection between the property and illegal activity. It is then up to the owner of the property to prove in court that he owns it or earned it legitimately. It doesn’t require a property owner to actually be convicted of a crime. In fact, most people who lose property to civil asset forfeiture are never charged.

It’s probably worth noting that this is another example of government stealing when the underlying offense was a victimless crime. I reckon this must be a turbo-charged version of Mitchell’s Law.

I agree, this “civil forfeiture” crap is the most blatantly unconstitutional practice I’ve seen; and that’s saying a lot these days. That story about the bail money is beyond outrageous. Words are insufficient…

WRT the first paragraph, I prefer to define myself anti-statist: I feel that “libertarian” has an ideological ring to it. I just have a general repellence towards expansion of State power, without any strong beliefs about exactly what the limits of State power should be. I like Locke’s prescriptions for those limits, but Locke did not define himself libertarian; even “liberalism” was not yet a recognized ideology in his time.

People have been asking “Who Watches the Watchmen?” since the first century, and it’s only natural to have some distrust of those we hire to protect us. But when those protectors turn on the ones they’re supposed to protect, to whom can we turn?

Just from the debating tactics point of view, it seems to me that whether the alleged crimes are “victimless” or not is irrelevant. Suppose, to take the motel example, that someone used one of his motel rooms to plan a murder or assemble a bomb. Clearly this would be a real crime and the person who did it deserves to be punished. But it is still not at all clear to me why the hotel owner should have his life destroyed because a person used his property in the course of the plot without his knowledge. I would think it is a pretty elementary principle of justice that a person should not be penalized when he has not even been charged with a crime, never mind convicted.

I think many people would oppose civil forfeiture if they knew it was going on who would not agree with you about the drug war.

Funny that the Fifth Amendment says, “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Nevertheless, civil forfeiture, which would seem to pretty clearly violate these plain words, has never been struck down by the courts. But the Supreme Court declared that the Ninth Amendment, which reads “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”, means that no restrictions are allowed on abortion. Yes, I’m sure when the founders wrote the fifth amendment, the idea that this would prevent the government from depriving someone of property without due process of law was not at all what they had in mind. But when they wrote the Ninth Amendment, they were obviously thinking about abortion.

Asset seizure is against the 4th amendment.
Since this is a felony committed by the police and federal government, by all means take them to court. But make sure that you target the people committing the crime, not the departments. After all, the citizens of this country shouldn’t have to pay for their crimes.

Fellow Americans, take action to clean up our country from this culture of corruption; today we are seeing the results and we are suffering the consequences. In this United States not one is above the laws; this corrupt Tewksbury Police Department must follow the rule of law, not void it. This United states have become a police state that is engage in the persecution of their citizens, while allowing the agencies that are trusted to fight crime to be engage in criminal activities. We all know that the DEA, CIA and the FBI are working with the Mexican drug cartels and are engage in the trafficking of drugs and money laundry from Mexico and not one is doing a thing about this. The major drug traffickers of this United States are the CIA and the DEA, they are the killers of millions of Americans and the ones that also destroy their families. The drug war is a farce, a pretense to show the American people that they are doing something about this huge criminal activity that is destroying our communities; to this corrupt government we are all expendable not matter what is the issue, they think that they are above the law and they can do what they please, because congress has allowed them to cover up their crimes under the pretense that their actions are taken in the best interest of the United States and conceal their crimes with executives orders and national security. Fellow American, this country was build by people with moral character, believers in freedom and our Constitution. Do your duty and fight for the preservation of our constitution and the rule of law. I am an American and I will continue fighting for what is right for America. My loyalty is to may country The United States of America, not to any politician, political party or organization. I will expose corruption on government and at the private sector, because corruption feed greed and greed will destroy humanity and our country.
God bless America and all the Patriots that keep doing what is right for our country. Be an activist and do your duty, stand for your fellow American, send letter to your representatives at state and federal levels, the news media and human rights organizations, believe me you count, do what is right. Not one is above the laws, do process and the rule of law must be follow.

I heard of stories of a car which was stolen and then used in a crime. The police seized the car, and the rightful owner could not got it back, because the car was a mean of crime, even when the owner did not even know who the criminal.

[…] P.S. Also keep in mind that the Drug War is the main excuse politicians given when they impose bad asset forfeiture laws and costly anti-money laundering laws. And it’s the Drug War that is usually the motive when politicians and courts erode our Fourth Amendment liberties and trample our individual rights. […]

Obtain and read “Unintended Consequences” by author John Ross. Although out-of-print and a little pricey, it is still available on ebay and amazon. It is a good read and offers solutions to our out-of-control government. The book combines fictional characters with accurate historical information and is a how-to book on “getting things done”.
Sellers of this book were harassed by ATF and other government agents. It seems that these government agents were not too keen on the book’s premise.

You should know that the Sheriff is the chief law enforcement enforcement officer and he swears in all local plolice officers. He is elected and had total control control over the local ploice. Since he is elected and he so choses he can walk into the local police department, Fire them all and take over the deperment and nobody can do anything about it since he is elected. Whose side would the public be on after pe explained why he did it. We forget the power of an elected sheriff

Civil asset forfeiture, in the absence of a convicted crime, is armed robbery, theft by taking. Although against the “law”, the victims can morally and ethically use deadly force in retaliation against the police or other enforcement agents.

Government is a criminal enterprise engaged in fraud, theft, violence and murder. Should anyone doubt that this is true, these examples are evidence of the enterprise engaged in by government and its employees and agents.